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The premiere of the opera Lohengrin was held on the 28th of August 1850 in Weimar. It was conducted by Ferencz Liszt, Wagner’s close friend. It was he who had contributed to the staging of the opera, completed two years earlier. Wagner could not be present at the event: his stormy social temperament led him to the barricades of the German revolution in 1848–1849, after which, thanks to a happy coincidence, he found a shelter in Switzerland using false documents and was there on the day of the premiere. While sitting in one of the hotels in Lucerne and watching at the clock, the composer tried to time the performance…

Lohengrin, with its slowed down action, which contributes to an immersion into the contemplation of sublime, mystically incomprehensible forces, contrasts with the stormy events, lived through by the author at the time of finishing the work on this opera. The seed of the story was found in the legend of Lohengrin, young knight of the holy grail, who has descended from the mountain peaks into the mortal world to be their defender. The libretto was written by the composer himself and he reimagined an episode of the medieval novel by Wolfram von Eschenbach Parsifal in a romantic spirit (Lohengrin is Parsifal’s son).

The key moments and storylines were borrowed from the novel: the sacred nature of the hero’s name, which cannot be known to any mere mortals, and a swan who accompanies him when he appears in the human world. However, the main events of the libretto are the fruit of the composer’s own imagination. At the beginning of the opera, the singular and urgent request of the knight to his bride Elsa of Brabant can be heard – that she never asks him his name. And yet people, even the most perfect, are not able to restrain their passions. The question asked by Elsa (already his wife) is, in an everyday sense, expected. A wife has to know the name of her husband and the unknown is painful for her. An elevated culmination of the finale becomes a monologue in which the knight reveals his name… Touching the sacred inevitably entails the loss of it. Therefore, the outcome of the opera is logical: Lohengrin’s departure to the heavenly heights is as mysterious and incomprehensible as his arrival.

A few years after the premiere, the popularity of Lohengrin became unstoppable, like an avalanche. In 1853 it was staged in Wiesbaden, in 1854 – in Leipzig, Breslau, Stettin, Frankfurt am Main and Darmstadt, in 1855 – Cologne, Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Augsburg, Hannover, Prague and Riga… A little later Vienna, Zurich, London, Bologna, Florence, and Milan also joined… In 1858 the future king of Bavaria, Ludwig II, was present at the premiere of Lohengrin in Munich. Since then, this opera and its author became his objects of delight and adoration, and his Neuschwanstein Castle (the interiors of which were inspired by Lohengrin) – the grandiose “materialization” of these feelings.